What do you do when you’ve just won a hard-fought presidential primary campaign even though a huge chunk of your party preferred another candidate, you are neck and neck in the polls, people are suspicious of the strange church you belong to, and you need to sew up the white working class vote? Why of course, you run ads about welfare reform, even cruelly bragging about how you passed legislation in your state that reduced welfare rolls by eighty percent. Dog whistle politics at its worst. What was Barack Obama thinking? H/T Mickey Kaus via Instapundit.